History 597.03—Readings in the Civil Rights Movement:
An Ongoing Struggle for Liberation and Equality
Dr. Bernadette Pruitt
Monday Nights, 6-9 PM
Office Hours—M, W & F, 1 PM; and 11 to 112:30 PM, T & TH
or by appointment
AB4 Room 459, 294-1491/1475
HIS_BXP@SHSU.EDU
For emergencies, call instructor in office or at home, 438-8868 before 10 PM


REQUIRED READINGS:
Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s.
    Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1981.
    ISBN: 067447255

Cleaver, Kathleen and George Katsiaficas, eds. Liberation, Imagination, and the Black
Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and Their Legacy.  New York:
Routledge, 2001.
ISBN: 0415927846

D’Angelo, Raymond, ed. The American Civil Rights Movement: Readings and
Interpretations. New York: McGraw-Hill/Dushkin, 2001
ISBN: 0072399872

Dittmer, John. Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1994.
ISBN: 02052021029

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Bantam Books, 1989.
    ISBN: 0553213369

Dyson, Michael Eric. I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr.
    New York: The Free Press, 2000.
    ISBN: 0684857761

Eick, Gretchen Cassel. Dissent in Wichita: The Civil Rights Movement in the Midwest,
1954-72. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001.
ISBN: 0252026837

Foner, Eric. A Short History of Reconstruction. New York: Harper and Row, 1988
     ($10.50 used).

Haley, Alex and Malcolm X.  The Autobiography of Malcolm X Broomall,
Pennsylvania: Chelsea House Publishers, 1996.
    ISBN: 0791040526

Kellar William Henry. Make Haste Slowly: Moderates, Conservatives, and School
    Desegregation in Houston  College Station: Texas A. & M. University Press,
    1999.
ISBN: 0890868187

Rupert, Lewis. Marcus Garvey: Anti-Colonial Champion. Trenton, New Jersey: Africa
World Press, 1988.
ISBN:    0865430624

Pitre, Merline. In Struggle against Jim Crow: Lulu B. White and the NAACP, 1900-
1957. College Station: Texas A. & M. University Press, 1999.
    ISBN:     0890968691


Be advised that the Malcolm X monograph is sold at most bookstores in the Houston-area (perhaps including Huntsville) for $6.00. All readings are on reserve in the Newton Gresham Library on campus. Reading materials may be found at the Kampus Korner or Bookland bookstores in Huntsville.  Reading materials are also available at the university bookstore.


COURSE OBJECTIVE:
This graduate readings course examines the civil and human rights struggle among African Americans of the United States.  While many scholars point to the landmark 1954 Brown Decision as the pivotal event that signaled the birth of the modern Civil Rights Movement in the US, others concur that the struggle for black liberation and equality began centuries earlier.  This course, thus, delves into the history of the black civil rights agenda of African Americans—and their allies—in response to racial oppression.  Many groups over time—slaves, abolitionists, Radical Republicans, progressives, educators, middleclass housewives, wage earners, proletariat activists, New Dealers, politicians, ministers, socialists, professionals, entrepreneurs, and human rights activists—built inter-racial and intra-racial coalitions to offset the attack on African-American dignity, social empowerment, political inclusion, and economic progress.  Readings in the Civil Rights Movement, therefore, chronicles both the movement and its activists.  Although the course primarily concentrates on the post-World War II Civil Rights Movement, readings, lectures, and class discussions will also study the civil rights agendas of the antebellum, post-Civil War nineteenth-century, and early twentieth-century periods.    


The course concentrates on six periods of protest and activism among black Americans.  The first period, The Holocaust of Enslavement (1500-1865), began in West and East African villages when slavers and local kidnappers permanently removed individuals from their families, communities, religions, cultures, languages, and way of life; slave ships then transported millions of innocent victims to their hell on earth—the “New World.”  Oppression continued in Spanish America, the Dutch West Indies, New France, and of course, British North America.   The demand for tobacco, sugar, indigo, and rice, soon led to the emergence of chattel slavery in the colonies.  By the post-Revolutionary Era, the big business of plantation slavery spread southwestward, promising profits for planers, especially cotton planters after 1800; regrettably, for enslaved blacks, this meant generational oppression.  The fight for racial liberation and social equality for blacks was difficult at best: many runaways fled slavery to find entrenched racial bigotry in the North; other captured runaways faced harsh and cruel punishment, including death; slave revolts usually led to instant death for black and white assailants.  Nevertheless, antebellum black and white activists—David Walker, William Lloyd Garrison, Marvin Delaney, James Burney, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman—continued the fight for black liberation and in time formed a revolution that soon led to the disunion of the US.   Only with the reality of Civil War—a war fought heroically by 200,000 black volunteers, including 5,000 men who fought on the side of the Confederacy—did Emancipation become a reality for four million enslaved people of color.    

The next period, Emancipation and Reconstruction (1863-1877), witnessed profound societal changes for blacks and whites.  Constitutional Amendments eradicated slavery, granted citizenship to African Americans, and gave black men access to the ballot.  Some 600 black men secured positions as government officeholders and passed legislation that created free public schools for white and black children, public colleges, hospitals, orphanages, and public lands for railroad speculators.   Texas Representative William H. Holland, for example, introduced a bill create the first public college for blacks in Texas.  Resentful whites, still reeling from the disappointment of war, turned inward and created new mechanisms of social control and domination.  They formed gangs that terrorized black landowners and voters, intimidated politically-astute Republican Party supporters, and created a new economic system that regulated blacks to debased positions on farms throughout the South as sharecroppers.  By the end of Reconstruction, they had convinced national Republican Party leaders to abandon black social equality.  This would, thus, ensure their influence and domination over the black masses for the next century.      

The next period, Welcome Jim Crow: The Rise of the New South (1877-1900), saw profound setbacks for freedmen and women.  Many lost their hard-fought rights when white southerners used social custom, educational disparities, unequal farm policies, legal segregation laws and ordinances, and racial violence to foster white hegemony and social control.  African Americans responded by forming educational alliances, political coalitions, labor unions, and interracial coalitions.  The Populist Movement, for example, represents one such interracial response.  The most common response came in the form of accommodation.   Booker T. Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise,” in 1895, marked the high point of black accommodation.  Unfortunately, increased racial conflict by the new century fostered a sense of disillusionment among African Americans.  A growing number of blacks and whites began to articulate the need for new, more aggressive alternatives.

The fourth period, known to revisionist historians as, The Birth of the Civil Rights Movement (1900-1930), marked the beginning of heightened black hostility toward racial oppression.  A new, college-educated black middleclass—Ida B. Wells, Monroe Trotter, Mary Church Terrell, and William Edward Burghardt Du Bois—formed civil rights organizations, scholarly associations, women’s clubs, self-help charities, and institutions that publicly challenged both white racism and Washington’s accommodationist politics.  The first direct challenge came from the Atlanta University, Harvard-trained historian—W.E.B. Du Bois.  His timeless Souls of Black Folk (1903), not only attacked the Washington race model but also assaulted its founder.  In time Du Bois’ National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) would intensify the liberation cause among African Americans.   In the next few years, working-class black southerners, far removed from the NAACP and its purpose, formulated their own attack on southern racial oppression—migration.  The first Great Migration encouraged the mass exodus of one million blacks.  They mostly left rural communities, often against the wishes of their employers; others fled small towns and cities in the South.  All moved to urban, industrial centers in the South and North; these migrants also moved into wage-earning, manufacturing and transportation-related jobs.  Blacks in increasing numbers worked in automobile factories, on docks, in steel foundries, in meatpacking plants, in oil refineries, in cotton compress industries, in laundries, and in white households in cities.  Unfortunately, migrants were not immune from institutionalized racism.  The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 showed America that northern whites would refuse—at all costs—to accept blacks into their communities, schools, workplaces, and cities.  Postwar prosperity stimulated a second and larger wave of migration from the rural South.  Equally important, Marcus Garvey’s black-nationalist rhetoric found a listening ear among working-class blacks living in these burgeoning cities nationwide.  Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) fostered hope, self sufficiency, economic independence, and most of all, racial pride, in millions.  At the same time, the 1920s witnessed the emergence of the “New Negro,” and Harlem Renaissance, two interrelated cultural, artistic, intellectual, societal, and economic, revolutions among urban blacks.  These “New Negroes,” for example, more and more identified with the growing number of black intellectuals, activists, and dissidents who emphasized self expression and economic empowerment.  

Regrettably, the collapse of the economy by the late 1920s led to unemployment among many working-class and middleclass blacks.  This fifth period, Depression and War (1930-1950), severely retarded the already fragile black community.  Frustrated and disillusioned, these farm families opted for change in many ways.  Some left farms by the tens of thousands and strolled into cities, looking for work or public assistance.  After the passage of FDR’s New Deal, some tenants remained in their rural communities and opted to challenge their greedy and unfair employers.  These radicals formed organizations like the Alabama Tenant Farmer’s Association.  Others, facing underemployment and wage differentials at industries nationwide, joined the mass union movement, spearheaded by the creation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).  Then others, grateful to Roosevelt’s policies and New Deal agencies, abandoned the party of the “Great Emancipator,” and entered the New Deal coalition of Democratic mainstream voters.  The political migration of African Americans into the Democratic Party in the 1930s, unquestionably, according to historian Nancy Weiss, made the world cognizant of the potential political strength of the black electorate. Then, with the coming of America’s entry into WWII, black leaders, like Asa Philip Randolph, made it clear to politicians—including Roosevelt—that African Americans would no longer accept a second-class position in the United States.  Nowhere was this more evident than in Houston.  Motivated by the passions of union men and women, middleclass blacks—teachers, businesspersons, physicians, attorneys, journalist, newspaper moguls, and ministers—successfully attacked the white Democratic primary, the main tool used to oppress blacks politically Texas.  Energized by their Supreme Court victory over statewide bigotry—Smith vs. Allwright (1944)—these community builders and social activists in time decided to wage a frontal assault on school segregation.  The rest became history.

The phenomenal last period, The Second Reconstruction: The Modern-day Civil Rights Movement (1954-1974), witnessed the greatest period of black protest in this country’s history.  Many divergent segments of the black population formed the core of the movement—grassroots organizers and organization secretaries, housewives and young schoolchildren, high school and college students, parents and teachers, industrial wage earners and maids, longshoremen and railroad porters, farmers and farm laborers, college-degreed intellectuals and ministers, and college students turned revolutionary.   In time these groups—along with their white, Hispanic, and Asian allies—dismembered all legal forms of racial discrimination.  Ironically, African Americans in time, found themselves faced with other challenges—a white backlash, white flight, the emergence of Rustbelt urban centers, failing inner-city schools, growing black-on-black crime, and a widening black underclass.      

CLASS FORMAT:
Students will lead discussions each week over the assigned readings.  I will begin the discussions with a brief lecture on the period under discussion; then a student discussant leader will give the overview of the work being highlighted, and explain the work’s significance as a scholarly source on the movement.   The rest of the class will equally discuss the work, its strengths and weaknesses as a historical source, and its relationship to the civil rights movement.  

ABSENCE POLICY:
College policy does give professors the option of penalizing students for excessive absences (four or more).  Students in this class who have these kinds of absences will be penalized.    If you have special problems, please contact instructor immediately.  Attendance will be taken daily.  Also, please make an effort to be in class on time.

ANALYTICAL ESSAYS
Students are responsible for writing a ten page, double-spaced, word-processed essay on four of the twelve required reading assignments.  I also expect for you to turn in photocopies of three book reviews on each reading assignment.  The book reviews can be found at the Newton Gresham Library and on the internet.  Students must also turn in with their assignments a short biography of each author.  Students can find biographic information on writers in the library and online on the Worldwide Web.  The essays and related materials are due on the specified dates listed on the course calendar.  Late essays will be accepted; but points will be deducted for late papers!  Students are eligible to earn up to 100 points for each assignment. Each essay is worth 20 percent of the final grade.  If anyone has any questions or concerns, please feel free to speak with me.  Again, late papers will be accepted but at a price—point reduction!

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Students are expected to do an annotated bibliography on a particular aspect of the civil rights liberation struggle.  The annotated bibliographies should include a paragraph summarizing the work.  Students can utilize an array of sources—primary documents such as newspapers, court records, or federal documents; and secondary sources such as monographs, anthologies, theses/dissertations, and articles. Please feel free to use the attached bibliography—download from my website or blackboard site—for suggested books and articles. The selected bibliography entitled, The African and African-American Holocaust, will be of use to students.  The selected annotated bibliography must include at least 100 sources that relate to various aspects of the civil rights struggle—the Du Bois-Washington debate, Garveyism, the NAACP, the National Association of Colored Women, Ida B Wells-Barnett, the Brown Decision, civil rights and the law, civil rights or the federal government.  This assignment is also worth 20 percent of the final grade and is due on the last class day—May 12.


FINAL GRADE AND GRADING SCALE:
Again, each grade totals 20 percent of the final grade.  The total for all grades will be averaged for the final grade.
The grading scale for each analytical essay final examination, and final grade:
                    90-100        A
                    80-89        B
                    70-79        C
                    60-69        D
                    Below 60    F
















Course Calendar
History 597.03- Readings on the Civil Rights Movement
Spring 2003 Semester
Sam Houston State University
Bernadette Pruitt, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of History


January 27        Introduction to the Course/Explanation of the Syllabus

February 3        The fight for social equality before Emancipation
            Lecture-Discussion

February 10        Emancipation and Reconstruction
            A Short History of Reconstruction

February 17        Whither Civil Rights: The Emergence of a Strange Career
            The Souls of Black Folk

February 24        Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association
            Marcus Garvey: Anti-Colonial Champion

March 3        The New Century and the Dawn of New Movements
            The American Civil Rights Movement: Readings and
            Interpretations—Chapter Two, “From Resistance to a Social
            Movement”    
            Annotated bibliography topics are due

March 17    No Class
    Spring Break Holiday
            Have a safe and fun spring break.  
                    
March 24        The Struggle against Jim Crow
            In Struggle against Jim Crow: Lulu B. White and the NAACP,
            1900-1957
            Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi
    
March 31        Brown and Beyond: The Movement Intensifies
            The American Civil Rights Movement: Readings and
            Interpretations—Chapter Three, “Brown and Beyond:
            Rising Expectations”
            Make Haste Slowly
 
April     7        The Civil Rights Movement: A Nationwide Liberation
            Struggle
            The American Civil Rights Movement: Readings and
            Interpretations—Chapter Four, “Student Activism
            and the Emergence of a Mass Movement”
    Dissent in Wichita        
    
April 14        Tremors
            The American Civil Rights Movement: Readings and
            Interpretations—Chapter Five, “The Militant Years”
            In Struggle: SNCC, and the Black Awakening of the 1960s
 
April 21        Power!
            The American Civil Rights Movement: Readings and
            Interpretations—Chapter Six, “Integration or Segregation?”    
            Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party

April 28        National Leadership: MLK vs. Malcolm X
            I May Not Get There With You
  Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years
                Awakenings (1954-1956)
                No Easy Walk (1961-1963)    

May 5            National Leadership: MLK vs. Malcolm X
            The Autobiography of Malcolm X
    Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years
                The Time Has Come (1964-1966)    
            Last Day of Class: Annotated bibliographies are due next week
                        
May 12-15        No Class: Annotated Bibliographies are due!!


BE ADVISED THAT CHEATING AND PLAGIARISM CAN RESULT IN AN AUTOMATIC "F" FOR THE COURSE.  THIS GOES FOR ALL ASSIGNMENTS AND TESTS. PLEASE REMEMBER DUE DATES FOR ALL ASSIGNMENTS AND TESTS. PLEASE DO NOT LOSE THIS SYLLABUS AND COURSE CALENDAR.  THESE WILL BE YOUR LIFELINE FOR THE COURSE THIS SEMESTER.  I HOPE THAT YOU WILL HAVE A GREAT TIME IN THIS CLASS.